


Four Witches

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Charlie Lives, Episode: s10e21 Dark Dynasty, Experimental Style, Fae & Fairies, Fix-It, Gen, POV Charlie, POV Multiple, Witches, massacre aftermath, so much Shakespeare, things that are hard to admit to yourself, women of many adjectives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-04-25 00:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4940104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After surviving her untimely demise, Charlie finds herself adrift in Shreveport, Louisiana.  But with news of the Styne Massacre already dominating all the local broadcasts and the Darkness gone to seed, Charlie realizes she’s going to have to choose her heroes and her stories wisely.</p><p>
  <i>Magic doesn’t make the witch, says Rowena.  That’s violence that does.  And we are witches three.  </i>
</p><p>
  <i>Welcome to the Scottish play, my dear.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Witches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lyryk (s_k)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/s_k/gifts).
  * Inspired by [What Happened Here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4264185) by [kalliel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel). 



_There’s a white girl on her doorstep. The second in as many months._

_What do you want this time? Tamara asks._

 

\--

 

Charlie calls the number she pulled from Sam’s phone. It’s a guy named Rudy; she’s played a lot of L4D2 with guys that sound like him. 

I need help, she tells him, then realizes she doesn’t have a story lined up. Not one that doesn’t involve Sam and Dean. She doesn’t have a story for this, the latest chapter in her life, that doesn’t begin and end with Sam and Dean. 

Rowena was right.

But Rudy doesn’t ask her story; it’s not his style to interrogate. Where you at? he says, and Shreveport, Louisiana, says Charlie, and Rudy says, Shit, really? You got any news on the ground about that massacre? Police channels are keeping it on lockdown.

Charlie hadn’t heard about a massacre; she’s been laying as low as she can. But when things are going as wrong as they are for her right now, it’s too easy to imagine the who and the why.

Maybe it was a massacre of vampires. Maybe it was a massacre of shifters. And if it has to be a massacre of humans, maybe it’s just a random one. This is America; it happens all the time.

She’s never wished for something like that before.

Her voice quivers when she reminds Rudy, I need help. Her bile burns all the way back down her throat. She swallows again.

Only got one line down in Shreveport, says Rudy. She don’t like me much--badmouthed her beau once; but the new one, at least, not the dead one. You can try her, though. You’re gonna have to walk--Tamara doesn’t own a car.

Can I take a cab? asks Charlie. It makes her feel like a Real Housewife, and she doesn’t know why she asks. You can’t really make a Wild West entrance into town in a Yellow Cab--you need a long shadow, spurs clicking on hard ground, dust billowing up behind you. But it’s been a long couple days, and technically, Charlie’s dead. She wouldn’t mind a little of the RIP that’s supposed to come with.

Rudy doesn’t judge--which actually makes him nicer than most of his voice twins on L4D. Just says, Good, you’ve got some cash--that’s good. Take the cab if you got the cash.

You be careful, okay? Something real bad’s tearing things up down there, he says. Call me if you need anything more.

Rudy’s dead inside a week. Got tore up by something real bad, starts with a D, ends in a W--which means hunters can’t spell, Charlie supposes, but every one of them still knows what that means. 

So does she.

 

\--

 

Oskar’s blood isn’t yet dry on her hands when Rowena returns to Tamara. The little red one made it, too, only her name is Anita now, not Charlie.

Magic doesn’t suffer lies gladly, Celeste, Rowena reminds her. Names have power.

Then I want my last name to be Sarkeesian, says the girl. 

Tamara rolls her eyes. 

Rowena isn’t interested; neither she nor the coven ever had any use for clan names. Magic is a found family, and after all, blood-kin are only ever a liability.

She’d had nine months to learn how seriously the coven believes in this.

I can’t get that smell out of my bathroom, you know, Tamara informs her, over the sound of a girl retching. She does that every time that massacre comes on on the news.

Ah, of course. The handiwork of an old dear friend, as I’m sure you’ve deduced, says Rowena.

He was sloppy about hiding it, yes, Tamara replies. And she adds, Dean Winchester is not a dear friend.

And she adds again, Nor were the Stynes.

This is one of Tamara’s best qualities: She is wholly untroubled by bloodshed.

Rowena smiles before she turns to the red girl, newly returned from her sick.

It appears we need to have this conversation one more time, says Rowena. And she says, There's something large and long in tooth you still need to ask yourself, my shy little girl: 

Will you be in the Scottish play, or the Moorish one? 

Tamara folds her arms (vocal body language is one of Tamara’s worst qualities), but Rowena ignores her. 

I'll assume you don't want to be in the Danish, she continues. Drowning is ugly.

So ugly, in fact, that she’d nearly drowned her baby--poor chubby Crowley before he’d turned Crowley. He’d been just a wee gray thing, and she still bleeding and swollen. She’d gone waist deep in the marsh with him. But the coven had been so faithlessly quick to sign her away, she hadn’t the chance. 

Rowena raised that babe to a boy just to spite them. And finally, spite them she has.

I'm not shy, says the little girl. There’s a danger to her when she says it, as though her stakes in the matter are higher than most. But Rowena supposes a girl like her has to be proud or nothing at all.

Oh, not to people, you aren't, Rowena allows. But we're not talking about people, are we now? We're talking about you.

I’m not shy, the girl repeats.

Magic doesn’t make the witch, says Rowena. That’s violence that does. And we are witches three. 

Welcome to the Scottish play.

 

\--

 

She’s either Charlie, Anita, or Celeste. She doesn’t quite seem to know, herself. But she does know about Isaac, which is strange. Tamara hadn’t taken the Winchesters for storytellers; at least, not for tales that don’t end well. But then, it’s not their husband who’d burned; maybe they remember that day differently. All glory and heroism, and she just another widow, forgettably common and sad.

Tamara knows a different story, the way she always does, but nineteen Stynes were executed in their home last Tuesday--and there are three still unaccounted for. Perhaps Dean Winchester knows some different stories now, too.

Nostalgia for the old country, Tamara says when Charlie can’t stand to speak of the massacre any longer, and instead asks after Tamara. That is, Tamara and Rowena. 

Tamara explains brusquely, Of course, I’m a Londoner; and she’s not. But we have a few mutual interests.

Apparently her accent hadn’t been a part of whatever story Charlie knew; and Charlie hadn’t been able to hide the surprise from her face, that first time they spoke. 

Maybe she’d had to navigate through too many of Tamara’s Creole neighbors, and just assumed. It wouldn’t be the first time.

When I was a girl, says Tamara, I did some schooling in Wales. Magic can be very, very real there, as Rowena is well aware.

But you’re not a witch, says Charlie. She seems so certain of this. You’re not a witch; you’re a hunter.

And you’re not a hunter, Tamara replies. Or are we ready to live beyond our pasts?

 

\--

 

It’s obvious Tamara doesn’t like her much. Maybe it’s Charlie’s lack of invitation. Maybe it’s Leia, which Tamara sees one night when Charlie is changing and Tamara forgets she’s not alone in her house anymore. Which just goes back to lack of invitation.

But Tamara is dating a minister, and she seems pretty hardcore about not being gay. She’s also a social worker of some kind, and a red-eyed teary-faced boy keeps coming around asking after a Cyrus Styne. Tamara always turns him away, because they’ve talked about this, George, and think of your poor mother, and she’ll send you to that camp if that’s what it takes to set you right, you know that, don’t you? but Charlie knows his look. That’s heartbreak. Romance nipped in the bud.

It’ll be easier for him, with Cyrus dead, Tamara assures her. He’ll find a nice girl.

Charlie knows that’s not how it works. And she knows it won’t be easier this way. Cyrus Styne is dead (well, missing. But deep down, just like Tamara, Charlie nows he’s dead. Dean killed him). Death makes nothing easier.

But it’s hard to think about that kid without also thinking about everything else, and Charlie’s stomach isn’t doing too well with everything else. Which is weird, because Dean Winchester is probably the only thing Charlie feels like she doesn’t have to justify to Tamara.

Even if what he’s done is probably the only thing she should.

Maybe it’s because Tamara gets it, in ways Charlie can’t put into words. Maybe Charlie just doesn’t want to be the one to bring Dean Winchester to justice. Justice is sharp-tongued and taloned, in Charlie’s mind; an unforgiving goddess. Justice and Dean probably have history.

But Charlie still doesn’t know if she can get over this. 

She admits this one night, when Rowena is away, and it’s just her and Tamara on the couch watching the news play the same soundbites over and over and over again. The same ticker text. The same still frames. Someone set fire to the house shortly after the killings, destroying what could have been critical evidence. That suspect is at large, too, but a neighbor saw him flee the scene in a gold lowrider. 

Charlie wonders where Sam is right now. She tries not to realize that he might not be around anymore. And if he is, he’s not innocent, either. (Just like her.)

I don’t know if I can get over this, she says. She loves them, she hates this, she doesn’t know how to reconcile the two, she doesn’t know how to make it right. This is destroying her. She loves them. They are not killers. She doesn’t know if she can do this.

Then you shouldn’t be here, says Tamara. She’s eating popcorn. She’s the kind of girl who sucks the salt from all the hard kernels left at the bottom of the bowl.

Charlie hates that.

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath and she tries not to scream.

She takes a deep breath.

A deep breath.

 

\--

 

 _Use this knife to stop your heart,_ Rowena had said, proffering a blade from her sleeve. Charlie wondered where Rowena had kept it, to keep Sam from confiscating it. 

She said: Make sure you slip it between your ribs, and at an angle. Your heart is behind your sternum, my dear. And do stab hard. It’s a very thick muscle.

I don’t see how this helps me, Charlie replied. She’d been moments from breaking Nadia’s code and she could feel it; but Rowena had gone from tetchy distraction to oracle of foreboding, and it’s hard to ignore that sort of thing.

You need to die tonight, Rowena explained. I can help you live to tell the tale.

Well, that’s intriguing, Charlie said. She’d tried for blase but hadn’t quite made it.

Rowena leered, like a dragon sensing weakness. She’d said, There’s an old spell--Scottish, Irish, Welsh, the whole lot have each her own variation--that can transfer pain, transfer life. It starts with a knife to the heart. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard the tale of the selkie king. You’re a part of the Winchesters’ little storybook, my girl, and trust me, you die. There’s no escaping that. 

But tonight and tonight alone, I can make sure death is not your ending.

I don’t make deals with demons, said Charlie.

Oh aye, nor I, agreed Rowena. But I am not the King of Hell--just his mother. And I can save you.

Why do I have to die at all? asked Charlie.

Name me a beginning and end of yours that doesn’t start with Sam and Dean. You’ve done with Oz. Your mother is gone. You have no story anymore that isn’t theirs. That means you’re expendable.

I have a family, Charlie argued. They’re my family. I have friends. I have a degree in computer science--and okay, it’s fake, but still--I can get a job anywhere I want. I have books and games and TV; I don’t need a quest. I don’t need to die.

But you don’t believe that. Rowena’s eyes are dusky, sultry slits. You never have. Just take the knife; whether you use it can be yours to decide.

But if Sam and Dean think I-- Charlie started. I can’t--

Not to them--

I do suspect it will smart some, Rowena agreed. But that’s for the best, isn’t it? You don’t want to die in vain. You don’t want to die unmourned. You’re not that selfless.

I don’t want to die at all, said Charlie.

Then we’ve reached an accord, haven’t we. 

Rowena smiled. Besides, if you live beyond your ending, maybe you’ll be there to pick up the pieces. If that’s the real, true wish in your heart.

Why would you--Wicked Witch--help me, Not-Wicked, Not-a-Witch?

Why not? Rowena steepled her fingers, and her cuffs sank down her small thin wrists. I’m a lonely, evil skank--a woman of many adjectives, she’d said, which wasn’t a real answer at all.

I am a woman of many adjectives.

 

\--

 

_Are we all ready now, to live beyond our pasts?_

 

\--

 

When the Darkness comes, it’s nothing Louisiana won’t have seen before. And they will be as prepared for it now as they were the last time--which is to say, not very. Rowena had been in Indonesia when Katrina hit, and by then she’d weathered her share of deadly tropical storms. Often from someplace far and rich and safe, of course--but she’d seen the bodies floating in the streets. She’d drifted asleep to the sound of other people screaming.

The Darkness, at least, is insidious. It’s here already, just in bits and nascent pieces, but it doesn’t even cause a ripple in the steady stream of speechless, answerless media explaining the Styne killings in non-detail. If only the State of Louisiana were brave enough to dig to the heart of their new sad story. If only they knew what all it had wrought, from whence it had come. Or from whom.

It’s all driving Celeste slowly mad, but Tamara won’t turn the news off. Tamara so rarely leaves the house; she refuses to let the outside leave her, too. At least, this is what she’d screamed when Celeste reached for the remote. Rowena finds her fascinating.

She finds the both of them oh so fascinating.

One day, Celeste asks, You said magic doesn’t make the witch. What did you mean? 

Exactly what I said, says Rowena. Magic is all around.

(Or now it is, in any case. Now that the Darkness has come flooding back. Rowena can feel it in the soil, lingering in the pipes, brewing in the winds. Magic is all around the way it hasn’t been in thousands upon thousands of years. _And I thank ye, little red-haired girl._ )

It’s violence that makes the witch, Rowena says.

And stiffly, Celeste answers, I don’t follow.

Then you don’t belong here. Rowena clicks her tongue. You can try running back to your so-called brothers, if you like. They don’t receive their dead fondly, though. How good are you at parrying a knife?

There’s a long scar down the breastplate of this, Celeste’s new body. The only thing that’s different between the one that burned and the one Rowena spun. 

Celeste acts like it’s some sort of brand.

You’re allowed to leave, Rowena assures her. Don’t pretend I’m holding you in chains. Remember, I am not the one who does that.

Run, if you like, she says. Go on. See what’s left of the world you loved.

 

\--

 

_Magic doesn’t make a witch._

It takes real violence to grab ahold of magic, Tamara is told when she is young, a newlywed. Living in Wales. She’s three weeks pregnant at the time. 

She doesn’t think much of the notion until it’s magic that kills her baby. She hadn’t realized magic did not need to be provoked.

She mourns for a year, full-time. And she comes to a second and powerful realization: Magic hadn’t realized Tamara might grab back.

Then they’re in the States, all guns and runes and rock salt.

Then Tamara’s alone.

And Tamara grabs harder. She grabs like her life depends on it (and it does) like magic is nails in too many coffins, it punctures the seams of her fingers where they meet nail, her fingers thrashing against wood against metal against rock against the universe itself, this is magic, this is the violence it takes to beat it, this is the violence that rules her life and shapes her breasts and puts the shine in her scars. This is a tale of violence, this story of Tamara’s, and those end in only two ways. Either there’s violence in your hands, or you die with its fingers hard around you.

If this is what it takes to survive, if this is how she has to prove her strength, her mettle, her value, then this is what she’ll do.

Tamara has no plans to die quietly. She has no plans to die.

Sometimes she watches Charlie mourn new hurt and hates her.

 

\--

 

_Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow_

 

\--

 

I can’t live like this, Charlie admits. This is just some weird cabal of blood and gore, and I can’t live like that. I mean, Tamara, your casseroles are great. And I mean, I know we’re not super, but I’ve definitely had rockier roomie relationships, so--

Tamara laughs.

This just isn’t me, says Charlie. This isn’t a world I want to live in, and I can’t pretend like--like this stupid massacre is okay with me, or like, yay Witchy Girl Power! or any of this. I just can’t.

It’s not a cabal; it’s reality, Tamara reminds her.

But it’s not mine.

So what do you want, then? A different knife through your heart?

There’s no anger in Tamara when she suggests it. Just pain, frustration. Like Charlie’s a walking, talking reminder of something Tamara has already spent too long escaping.

I’m sorry, says Charlie. I’m not trying to hurt you, or bring up--old stuff, or just--

It’s not a cabal; it’s reality, Tamara just repeats. 

Violence is as violence does and all you can do is make sure you’re the is and the does and never on the other side of that. That’s what Tamara means.

I don’t believe that, says Charlie. I refuse to believe that.

Oh, that’s right, says Tamara. Charlie can tell she wants to sneer, she wants to cry. She is a woman of many adjectives. 

Tamara decides to sneer.

That’s right, because you used to play all that make-believe. You told me.

Yeah, says Charlie. And I still do.

 

\--

 

Some mornings, Rowena wakes to the smell of the Scottish marsh. She feels its coolness against her thighs.

She hasn’t been home in three hundred years.

Celeste is standing at the foot of her bed.

I’m not a ghost, she says, Don’t worry. 

Rowena wonders what about her face claims worry. Because honestly, she isn’t. Not very.

I’m not a ghost in your Scottish play, and you can do whatever you want with your knives and daggers.

Rowena yawns. 

Darling, it’s a bit early for histrionics, don’t you think? I don’t understand why you people wait for the wee hours to conduct these sorts of things.

(She can’t shake the lap of the marsh from her body.)

I’ve chosen my play, says Celeste. 

Also, I know what you’re thinking, and my name’s Charlie. I’m not Celeste--just Charlie. Forever.

Rowena rolls her eyes. Let me guess, she says, and yawns again. ‘Charlie’ is twenty-fifth billed in Sam and Dean’s Thrilling Adventure?

Nah, says Charlie. Mine is more about the magic and the quests and stuff. But sometimes there’s crossovers; I save them a few times. I’m going to save them, by the way.

Oh are you? says Rowena. She’s the only soul who’s seen the Winchesters in months--had tea with Sam four days ago, in point of fact--and she doesn’t think that likely.

I don’t believe in your cabal of violence, says Charlie.

Rowena rolls her eyes. The girl’s broken record sometimes. It’s a dreich day when this is what she’s forced to wake to.

And what is this play of yours, _Celeste_? she asks.

 

\--

 

There’s a white girl on Tamara’s doorstep. The second in as many months.

What do you want this time? she asks.

The girl bows. She’s only a courier, she says, a courier of the fae of the moor. Of Glinda.

Go on, says Tamara, and turns to the mailbox to check for bills. It will take more than fae at her door to nonpluss her. She’s already lived among her share of moorish fairies. 

But she must admit, their strange cadences make her instantly and restlessly homesick. 

I’ve a letter for Charlie, the girl chimes, and Tamara looks up from her mail. 

Its contents, a spell! A spell for Charlie. The one she asked for!

Okay, says Tamara. She hadn’t known Charlie knew any fae, and is annoyed by the blindside. But Tamara says, She’s buying milk. She’ll probably give you some if you wait.

The girl shakes her head. Forgive me for saying, but there is darkness here. It warps and twists. I don’t like it; I don’t know how you manage. 

She hands Tamara the envelope, and she’s gone.

In fluttery script, the outside reads:

_My dear Charlie: It’s magic makes the witch. Together we can unmake sad stories._

_Love, Glinda._

_P.S. Bring your friend._

Tamara’s hands shake. 

 

\--

 

_My play is the Moondorish one, says Charlie, just Charlie, forever. And my team’s gonna win._


End file.
